Hi. Welcome to Blender 3D.
What you are looking at is basically the default Interface when you open Blender, except that you'll have a different image in your splash screen..
It should be a version later than Blender 2.66.
The version I'm working in is a development version. It’s what will become Bender 2.67.
As you see,
it is what you look at when you open it for the first time,
except that, I shouldn't be there in your corner.
That would be very strange.
In the splash screen,
you can just click to get rid of it. But have a quick look at the links, a lot of people overlook these.
They are very useful, for instance, straight to the Blender website, where you can download the latest version of Blender,
or the user community where you can get a lot of help,
if you happen to get stuck.
There is also a Recent File list
for all the stuff that you've been working on just now.
If I click and get rid of it, you'll see the main screen
at the left top. This huge big block
is your 3D View.
That’s we call it.
It is basically your desktop. It is where you work. It is where you create shapes,
which, you can later, export for 3D printing.
Which is why I'm looking at Blender 3D with it.
The way that the layout Blender works, you can adapt it completely. But I’ll do almost all my work in this default layers,
is you have a screen, like this big screen here,
or area,
and only edge of the area is a menu.
At the bottom here are all the buttons and options and menus
to do with
the screen on top,
or the area on top.
But below, this bar is a different area, this is the Timeline.
We can hit Play and you can see the green marker go.
It's playing back an animation.
We're not really looking at animation. But the Timeline is nice to have there anyway.
I can get it back and the same as above.
You have an area.
And below it,
are all the options.
Same goes on the right, we call this the Properties menu.
It has all the properties below. Or on top is a menu with,
in this case, just a couple of buttons,
that give you different options. So you can get all the properties for the World or all the properties for the Object
you have selected.
Something to look at really quickly.
If you select something, I will make sure you can see what I'm doing,
there's a little icon here. You can see on what mouse button I’m clicking.
You see that I click on the left mouse button.
That is not default in Blender.
Blender usually select with the right mouse button,
which brings me to an important option, the User Preferences.
You can go to File, then User Preferences,
and it gives you a second window,
in which, you can go to Imput.
For instance, I have set it up to select with the left mouse button,
which is a little bit more like
other computer program’s work.
It's a personal preference usually. Because I work with
pen and tablet.
I found this really helpful.
Don't forget
to save your user settings
if you change anything at all.
Next, we'll have a look at how to look around in 3D view and how to move objects around.
Very very simple.
Maybe the most important thing to learn
when learning a 3D program, any of them,
is how to look around and understanding the relevance of your review relative to what you are editing,
the very basic controls
for looking around in Blender 3D.
First, you can look in the View menu at the left bottom here.
This has all sorts of very helpful options if you're ever lost,
and you don't know what you're looking at anymore, have a look here and you can save yourself.
What you do a lot of the time,
what I do most of the time,
is using your mouse wheel as if it's a button.
So I click on my mouse wheel,
and I drag the mouse around.
You can see,
we are looking all the way around the model.
I can control it.
I can click, drag, and look around.
This is really good for finding out
whether your model is fixed; whether it looks the way that you want or not.
If you do the same thing, I use the middle mouse button,
but together with Shft,
I can pan.
So you drag the entire screen
wherever you want it.
If you do it with Ctrl,
you can zoom in and zoom out.
I pan with Shft to the middle,
and Ctrl mouse wheel,
zooms in and out.
This is what you do a lot of the time
to check your model, look from all sides,
make sure you've made all the changes you want.
The other way to look around is using your numpad.
If you do not have a numpad, you can enable it in the User Preference.
Show you very very quickly. This is for people with laptops.
You can enable this option, "Emulate numpad", that will make the numbers
1 through 0
on your keyboard work as if they are the numbers
1 through 0 on your numpad.
The way you use it is, 1 on your numpad
show you the front of your view.
3 move it to the side,
7 moves you to the top.
You can use with Ctrl as an inverse.
You don't have to remember it right now. What you do want to remember is that,
in the View menu, it tells you all of these options.
For instance, you can see that the top is numpad 7,
and the front is numpad 1.
It may seem a little bit arbitrary what number does what.
But if you're using a numpad and you get a little bit used to it,
it starts making perfect sense.
Why this is all incredibly relevant?
I will show you in the next bit when we start manipulating object.